


Patience for Misery (after Haiku for London)

by imochan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post - Order of the Phoenix, second war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 15:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sequel, of sorts, to <a href="http://imochan.livejournal.com/248863.html#cutid1">Haiku for London</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patience for Misery (after Haiku for London)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Haiku for London](https://archiveofourown.org/works/927765) by [imochan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan). 



Approximately fourteen years, eight months and two days after [Haiku for London](http://imochan.livejournal.com/248863.html#cutid1).  For **blue_thundering**  :x :x :x  
  
**Patience for Misery.**  
(Remus, Remus/Sirius, PG13ish)  
 

When he wakes on the next morning, it is still summer. It has been for two days – since he’s been keeping track. It’s early in the season; the air is still cool in the room he wakes into. His skin prickles. There is a coating of feeble sleep on the back of his throat. The hem of a sheer curtain licks at the windowsill. He cannot see the sky, from here – only a line of rooftops, jostling geometry; and the natal sun slipping through the mortar. He turns his head away. There is a long flaking crack in the ceiling. There are ten perfect fingerprint bruises along his right forearm, where Harry gripped at him. 

He thinks: I have been somewhere like this before.

He sits up, and the sheets slip through his hands.

  
\-----

  
Tonks is in the kitchen. It makes him pause, in the doorway. He is out of practice, in being quiet and alone. And he has never been particularly good at comforting those kinds of people that look as though they need it: white and restless, cupping mugs of tea or sitting in a wooden chair with a thin knee drawn up against their chest in the dull light of a London kitchen, their jaws tight against grief, thin lips, heavy eyes, no sleep. (He thinks of James, when his parents died. He thinks of his own father. He thinks of the three hours he spent, once, in the autumn, looking in the mirror.)

“Oi,” she says.  “You’re up early.”

There is a kettle on the stove. He looks at it.  “Anyone about?” he asks.

“Not yet,” says Tonks. Her fingers are laced across her ankle, her socks are bright blue.  “Moody said he might come by later to talk about going down to King’s Cross tomorrow.”

“Oh?” he says.  He goes to the stove. He touches the kettle. There is a thin, translucent thread of steam slipping from the spout.  There is a small spot of grease on the stovetop. He suspects it is from dinner, four or five nights ago. It is all very solid and assured of itself.It feels so different, this time around.

“Should still be warm,” says Tonks. Helpfully.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. It comes out more firmly than he intended. It sounds accusatory; it echoes around in his skull for a moment longer than it should – it feels tinny and empty, ceramic and cold. One night, maybe only a week ago, Sirius had said _I think you got all hard, Moony, while the rest of the world got soft._ He’d said, _But you, you were always a fucking killer, weren’t you,_  and he’d laughed, because nobody could say something like that and get away with it and have it be true, except Sirius Black.

He opens the cabinet door. He finds a teacup.

“Dunno,” she says, finally. “I just can’t seem to leave. Last night, or.”

“You’d do well to,” he says. “It’s a horrible house.”

“It’s not,” she says. “It was his.”

“I understand,” he says. He looks up at her. She is watching him. “Except it’s no place for a young woman. No place for anybody, really.”

“ _You’re_ not going to leave,” she says.

“No,” he says. “Not right away.”

“Why not?”

He finds the tin labeled EARL GREY in Molly’s handwriting. “There’s nowhere else, right now.”

“That’s not true,” she says. She sounds more like Andromeda when she isn’t smiling so much.  You might not be a Black like they were, he thinks, but a little bit of betrayal, and you come awfully close. All that vague heartbreak, those misplaced arrows of emotion – and we all go down for the count because of it.

“I’m afraid it is,” he says.  He pours the water – the steam tickles the underside of his chin, warms his hand where it cups the side of the mug.  He looks at the empty chair beside her, and leans his hip up against the stove, instead.

“You could take Harry,” she says. “Find a flat in Hogsmeade or something, you know. He would have done that – he wanted to, he said.  Be a family, and.”

He cringes, quietly, at the thought of it. The tea is watery on his tongue.

“It is far too late for me to be any kind of family to Harry Potter,” he says, carefully.  “I hope you understand that.”

“But – ” she says.

“Besides, Dumbledore would never allow it.”

“Why not, because it’s not _safe_?”

“Precisely.”

“You know what he’d say about that, don’t you? What Sirius would – ”

He realizes it.  He is so tired of hearing that name. Everything in his life – from the moment he stepped onto the Hogwarts Express at eleven, with his trouser hems too short and his fingers bandaged up to keep from aggravating a sprain, and then he went and broke them anyway trying to pry Sirius Black’s fingers from his nostrils the next day, because he’d jostled him with his bag full of books and parchment and quills, and they ended up in the hospital wing, and Sirius had said _well_ , _hullo_ , _you punch rather brilliantly you know_ , and then they didn’t speak for another four weeks until he had found Sirius one night, halfway under the bed, pressing the sleeve of a wrinkled and discarded oxford shirt against his eyes because he’d had a horrible dream about a lethifold, and Sirius had made him _swear_ never to tell that James Potter, and he never did, _he never told_ – everything since then, has been helplessly orbiting the sound and the taste and the adolescent plummeting of his gut when people said things like _Sirius Black_.

“Yes,” he says.

He will continue to resist. It is all he knows.

He will wake up the next morning in the same bed on the third floor of Grimmauld Place. It will be the same bed he has slept in whenever he has been here. (Sirius said it was his brother’s. He has never believed that.) It will be the same bed that Padfoot sat on, snuffled on, curled up on the edges and sprawled over more than half of the ratty, half-dead mattress, on occasion. It will be the same bed that he found himself in, once, washed and re-dressed, with no recollection of either having happened after he stumbled in the back entrance, covered in cold mud and half gnawed-out from hunger. It will be the same bed that they lay on, once, together, side-by-side, with Sirius on the left and Remus on the right, looking up at the long flaking crack down the middle of the ceiling, and they had been talking about things that they never would have said if Sirius hadn’t gone rather mad and disappeared for twelve-odd years into the bowels of the worst place on earth, and Sirius had laughed and said, _D’you know, we probably should have fucked a lot more before all this, you know, when we could have, because well, bit useless now!_ Remus had said, _Probably_. And Sirius had laughed again and said, _Probably. Probably, yeah._

And then, in the same bed, Sirius had looked over and said, _If you don’t forgive me, that’s all right_ , _you know_ , and Remus had said, _I know._

And Sirius had closed his eyes. And there had been silence. And Remus could lie very still and think about how it felt to be loved out loud, however dangerously, however terrifying and painful and unbalancing and beautiful, at thirty-six years old.

So he will wake up tomorrow. The long crack will still be splitting the ceiling, and there will still be curtains on the windows, and maybe sunshine, and maybe cloud. There will be tea in the kitchen. He will wash his face upstairs, and he will probably see things out of the corner of his eye: the thump of a heavy black tail around the corner, a curling of fingertips against his collarbone, in the mirror. And he and Tonks and Moody will probably go down to King's Cross Station, and watch Harry Potter get off the train, and Harry will still likely be, he thinks, quite sad, for all that Dumbledore might have said to him. And, he thinks, I will still feel a little bit cold. I will wake up tomorrow, and I will still feel a little bit empty, I will still feel a little thin around the edges. And I will feel a little relief, too, at the certainty of death.

 


End file.
